Classroom basics a better outcome

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New curriculum goals have drawbacks for students, parents and
teachers, writes Kevin Donnelly.

After moving away from a traditional syllabus in the early
1990s, NSW appears set to water down still further the primary
school curriculum. As part of this, the NSW Board of Studies is
seeking public comment in response to a consultation paper aimed at
defining mandatory results for primary school students.

Significantly, the paper maintains the commitment in NSW to what
is known as an "outcomes-based approach" to curriculum. In the
past, schools have decided what will happen in the classroom by
having a syllabus that outlines, at the start of the year, what is
to be taught.

An outcomes-based approach, on the other hand, shifts the focus
to the end of the process by detailing what students should be able
to achieve at the completion of a set stage.

Whereas a syllabus is more traditional, stressing the importance
of the basics, regularly testing students and requiring
teacher-directed lessons, outcomes education embraces fads such as
group learning, non-competitive assessment and restricting
education to what students find most relevant.

Those who control the NSW curriculum argue that an outcomes
approach represents best practice. This is not so. In the words of
Bruce Wilson, the one time head of Australia's national curriculum
body, an outcomes approach represents an "unsatisfactory political
and intellectual compromise".

As the 1995 NSW Eltis report into the adoption of outcomes-based
education across Australia concluded, there was little, if any,
evidence to support the benefits of this approach.

Worse still, as noted by the Vinson report, enforcing a
bureaucratic and cumbersome approach to curriculum has served only
to increase teacher frustration and lower morale as valuable
teaching time is wasted.

The difference between syllabus and outcome-based education is
clear when looking at those countries that outperform NSW in
international maths and science tests associated with the Trends in
Mathematics and Science Study - the Netherlands, South Korea, the
Czech Republic and Singapore, which all ignore outcomes education
in favour of a syllabus approach.

The strengths of a syllabus are many. Teachers are given a clear
and succinct guide of what is to be taught at the start of the
year. Syllabuses relate to specific year levels, deal with
essential knowledge, understanding and skills and students are
regularly tested. As syllabuses are supplied to teachers and are
common across schools, teachers have more time to teach, rather
than having to design their own courses.

Associated with a syllabus is the expectation that teachers
stand at the front of the class and direct the lesson, instead of
students working individually or in groups, and that traditional
methods like rote learning and memorising are used.

An outcomes-based curriculum, on the other hand, adopts an
inferior approach. As outcomes relate to a range of years, on the
assumption that learning is developmental, students are able to
move from year to year without mastering the basics.

Unlike those countries that perform best in international tests
such as the trends study, where students are tested regularly
throughout primary and secondary school, the first time NSW
students face a competitive, high-risk examination is during the
final years of secondary school.

Not only are students promoted automatically on the assumption
that they will eventually "pick things up", but the reporting
system is vague and politically correct, with teachers told not to
rank students or to label them as failures, so that parents
complain about the lack of detailed feedback.

There is also a high level of illiteracy as outcomes education
has adopted education fads like whole language, where students are
taught to look and guess when confronted by an unknown word instead
of sounding out letters and combinations of letters.

In defence of outcomes education, advocates argue that some
Asian countries such as Japan have forsaken the more traditional,
syllabus approach in favour of the supposedly more creative
approach represented by the NSW curriculum.

True, Japan has adopted many of the educational fads of the West
such as life-long learning, creative learning and basing education
on the world of the child, but the decline in standards has been so
marked that many now argue that the experiment has failed.

Normally at the top of the league table in international tests,
Japan has fallen below countries it used to outperform. The public
outcry in Japan is to forsake experimental education, like that of
NSW, and return to what has been proven to work.

If the Carr Government is serious about raising standards, why
not give schools the autonomy, with the appropriate checks and
balances, to seek out the best curriculum from around the
world?

Schools in New York now teach the Singapore maths curriculum,
since Singapore consistently achieves the best results in
international tests. Such is the criticism of the New Zealand
senior school certificate that Auckland Grammar has opted to also
teach the Cambridge Certificate from Britain.

In Victoria, such were the failures of the Kirner government's
Victorian Certificate of Education when it was introduced in the
1990s, that some independent schools introduced the internationally
recognised International Baccalaureate - a choice denied to
government schools.

In an increasingly globalised world, where curriculum documents
can be downloaded in an instant, and where virtual classrooms can
operate across the globe, why restrict NSW schools to a
state-sponsored, parochial and second-rate curriculum?

Dr Kevin Donnelly is director of Education Strategies and the
author of Why Our Schools Are Failing.